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“Not My President!”

If I see one more posting on my Facebook page of a painting or photograph of Barack Obama in a blue, gray, tan or no suit all looking like an ad out of Gentleman’s Quarterly, I might “phrow up.”

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

That venue, GQ, would be appropriate. Obama is seen by his fans as the Very Model of a Gentleman. He is dignified, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered, good-looking and neither more nor less intelligent than a gentleman should be. In other words, he is not Donald Trump.

Never mind what kind of president Obama actually was: his capitulation to Wall Street even before he took office and his abandonment of millions of stressed American home-owners, his ratcheting up of a war in Afghanistan even as he was being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, his deportation of more than 2.5 million immigrants, his Tuesday drone strikes that killed nine bystanders for every alleged terrorist targeted, his neglect of African Americans, etc. He looked like a president. He spoke like one, better than anyone since John F. Kennedy. He was respected and even loved by other heads of state with the exception of Vladimir Putin. If being the leader of a great nation is about looks and eloquence, he can’t be beat.

Contrast that with the current occupant of the White House. Donald J. Trump is inarticulate to the point of idiocy, unsightly, mean (read his tweets), ignorant of even basic matters any minimally-informed citizen is aware of, vulgar, vain and egomaniacal to a degree someone less well-heeled might be institutionalized for. And that’s leaving out his appalling history of sexual predation (did I mention Obama’s squeaky-clean record on that account at least since his college days?).

How could anyone but someone who is delusional support, never mind be happy to have, someone like Donald Trump for president?

But, leaving aside that both Obama and Trump serve the interests of big money, the difference between them is mainly in style and personality.

Obama is in the mould of the charismatic politician writ large. He’s slicker and smoother than Clinton and Bush Senior, smarter than W and Reagan, but fundamentally the same, a political creature begat from and existing in a political environment. His morality is that of politics, not the world of trade and finance, though he served both. A politician like him may be corrupt, but he knows how to appear not to be and to stop short of behavior which might cost him his job.

(Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

Trump is a businessman. His morality is a businessman’s. That’s why he exposes himself so flagrantly to criticism and derision as a public official. In his world, the world of business, it is moral to bribe and return favor for favor. A businessman need not be acting cynically if he does a deal that, from an outsider’s point of view, involves threats and extortion, just as a politician can sincerely believe s/he is acting in the public interest if s/he engages in behavior that involves compromise, horse-trading, pork-barreling and daily lies to the public. The businessman justifies himself on the grounds of “that’s business,” the politician with “that’s how politics works.”

When I was a civil servant I was offered what amounted to an illegal gratuity on two occasions. In neither instance was the person offering the benefit (a free meal, a pair of shoes) aware that she or he was doing anything inappropriate. In the ordinary course of doing my job I had inadvertently made their own job or personal life a little easier. The proper etiquette in their eyes was to show appreciation, and in both cases it would have been out of their own pockets. What amounted to a crime under the law was to them the done, i.e. moral, thing. It would have been wrong, as they saw it, not to respond with a tangible token of their appreciation.

But business morality becomes problematic when it gets transferred to a political environment. Business, certainly big business, is feudal. The king reigns, everyone else takes orders. If he is king, he is by definition always right by the grace of God. Trump is used to that kind of environment and still thinks within it. He hires and fires as if he were sitting in his office in Trump Tower. He doesn’t feel any need to care about the good or bad impression he makes. His object is to win, make the deal, come out on top ahead of the competition. And winning is not just good, it justifies the winner (think war). Business people believe this as sincerely as any cleric does the validity of his or her faith. So do most heads of crime families.

But what Trump-haters I know actually object to is his personal style, not his policies, which are not all that different from the administration’s that preceded his. It’s his lack of “class”that infuriates them. He acts and talks like the sort of people they try avoid having for neighbors. They love Obama because he would not be an embarrassment at their dinner party, would in fact be the making of it. The atrocities and false promises Obama was guilty of don’t enter into the picture. Appearance is what matters. Trump is killing Americans by the thousands with his cuts to the social safety net and his failure to prepare for or deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not his incompetence or even his lack of common decency that irks Trump-haters. It’s because he represents everything they find distasteful, especially about the lower classes.

In ancient Greece, as in modern Great Britain, manual labor  was incompatible with gentility. No Greek who worked with his hands, even if he was the sculptor Phidias, could be considered a gentleman. Likewise, no member of the gentry in England wants their child to marry someone in “trade” (though many have, for the money). A similar snobbery is at work with Trump-haters, though they seem unconscious of it.

My Trump-hater friends’ willingness to embrace Joe Biden, knowing or caring nothing about what he has stood for or is likely to do as president, is the measure of how far they are willing to go to rid themselves of the orange buffoon. To do that they seem willing to suspend not just their judgment but their rationality. I too would like to see the back of Trump, but not to replace him with whatever is at hand and guarantee more of the same with different optics. I’d rather a slob who does the right thing than a gentleman who doesn’t have a clue to what the right thing is or care. Alas, I’m not going to get either.

A New Year’s Wish

In the house I grew up in, the Great Famine was a living memory. The starvation of a million Irish a century before I was born was the Holocaust I lived with, not the one that had recently occurred in Europe. Europe was far away, Ireland was right there in my mother’s kitchen. In those early years after a war that had engulfed the entire world, cost half a million American lives and ended with the destruction of two Japanese cities by atomic bombs, the Nazi concentration camps were only starting to enter public consciousness, never mind my six-year-old’s. At the same time, a civil rights movement for African Americans was beginning to gain traction. But Jewish refugees were told by fellow Jews to forget what had happened to them or their relatives in the old country and to get on with their lives. And African Americans were warned by their leaders and sympathetic Whites not to go “too fast” in their quest for equality….

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Why Fiction?

My latest at Eclectica…

In his essay on Gogol, V. S. Pritchett wrote about “the carelessness, the lethargy, the enormous bad taste of genius, its liability to accident, it’s slovenly and majestic conceit that anything will do. Don Quixote falls in half, the Chartreuse and Le Rouge et le Noir go shockingly to pieces, Tolstoy stuffs a history book into War and Peace, Fielding and Dickens pad and Dostoevsky wanders into ideological journalism…” Pritchett contrasted these faults in the great novelists of the 19th century with the modern novel which, he says, “has reached such a pitch of competence and shapeliness that we are shocked at the disorderliness of the masterpieces.” But in contrast to the unfinished patchiness of their antecedents, “In the modern novel we are looking at a neatly barbered suburban garden,” while in the greats, “We feel the force of a great power which is never entirely spent, but which cannot be bothered to fulfill itself.”

Not quite what we were taught in our English lit courses. But, true enough, it seems to me, and even more so since the ascendancy of post-modernism. The conclusion one reaches, or at least the one that has nagged at me for years, is that we who practice the art of fiction in contemporary times do so in a kind of silver or perhaps bronze age, unable to reach the heights of the 24-caret stuff produced by those lazy geniuses of the 18th and 19th centuries. We may write, some of us, with good form in carefully constructed sentences, but we’re just not made of the same stuff as a Dostoevsky or a Jane Austen….

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Is the Catholic Church Too Big to Fail?

The Wall Street banks were considered too big to fail and were forgiven for driving the economy into the ground and wrecking the lives of millions of Americans and who knows how many other people on the planet. They were not only forgiven, they were pumped full of trillions of dollars and allowed to go back to business as usual.

If Boeing or General Motors or any other giant corporation gets into serious financial trouble, they too have friends in high places to come to their rescue. Is this the same reason, too big to fail, why the Roman Catholic church, after decades of revelations about widespread sexual child abuse as well as continuing sexual assaults on seminarians and nuns, can avoid being held accountable for hideous crimes it has perpetrated and then covered up?

Why, in fact, do we use the euphemism “sexual abuse” for an act that amounts to rape and physical assault when talking about the felonious acts of the clergy of any religion? If public school teachers were accused of such crimes on a scale the Catholic clergy have perpetrated, would we demand nothing more than apologies and promises to do better? Would we continue to pay taxes without a substantial, basic overhaul of the educational system? Why do we leave it to the Vatican and the same people who have enabled and covered up clerical criminality for so long to take the necessary action?

The Church claims more than a billion members worldwide. It lives off the money those members contribute along with substantial corporate investments and other income. How many of those billion are practicing or even believers, I have no idea. What I do know is that no one in the Wall Street banks responsible for the Great Recession of 2009 faced criminal charges as a result or their criminal behavior. And I am not aware of any prosecutions of Catholic or other clergy on a scale commensurate with the crimes that have been alleged against them. Why not? Why are we satisfied with apologies and reforms instead of demanding long jail sentences?

Why also are we not hearing more of the details of specific, individual crimes that have done severe physical as well as lifelong psychological harm? I have in mind the rape of a boy by a clergyman reported in the New York Times, not Catholic in this case, who had to be operated on to repair the damage done to him. Such stories, when they are about media moguls or public officials, fill the front pages of our tabloid newspapers and much of the TV news. Why are graphic descriptions of assaults by those who are not the victims of priests and other clergymen appropriate for the media but the same acts by clergymen are not? Individual stories, whether shocking or heartwarming, engage our feelings in a way no statistics can. Those late-night TV shakedowns by organizations trolling for our contributions always show the appealing faces and withered bodies of individual children. Even legitimate charities attempt to connect individual suffering human beings with individual donors. News media trade on a fact of human nature: the tale of a specific individual is a tragedy, the report of thousands is a statistic. We rarely read about or hear graphic descriptions of clerical criminality, only reports or statements by victims who were “sexually abused,” usually over a period of years. But one graphic description is worth a thousand such reports, just as the account of an individual family who lost their home as the result of a predatory bank is worth any number of cold recitations of the number of such homes that defaulted.

The Catholic Church lost much of North America and almost all of Europe even before the current sex scandals were exposed. It has since concentrated its efforts in Africa and Latin America where it faces serious challenges from evangelical Protestantism. But it’s not yet in danger of going out of business. None of its lay members have any vote about who fills the ranks of their clergy. That clergy claims divine appointment – the same assertion monarchs used to make. Some Catholics agitate for a priesthood that includes women or for the right to use birth control, but they have no power to do anything more than humbly request such reforms. The Church hierarchy retains all authority to itself while demanding complete obedience from its members under pain of excommunication and eternal torture in an afterlife. It is an institution predicated on its own authority, not on democratic principles.

As long as we give our financial and corporate institutions permission to set their own rules we will continue to suffer the consequences of their greed. And as long as we accept the idea that autocratic religion, or “faith” as it is euphemistically called these days, can operate shielded from substantial consequences for its bad behavior, we will suffer the abuses that come with allowing such institutions the privilege of being too big to fail and too big to jail.


My latest at Eclectica:

“Chris Wallenska, Mister Wallenska (or, the preferred form, plain Mister) was fresh out of seven years of classics and philosophy. He was all of 24, although he seemed centuries beyond us in his knowledge of the world—the ancient Greek and Roman world, the only one that mattered. He taught us their languages as well as English and religion, a catechism class he deplored as theologically neanderthal. I remember him actually throwing the book, a thicker, more Jesuitical version of my elementary school’s, onto the floor in disgust when we reached the question regarding the effects of masturbation, which ranged from acne to sudden death. Any sign of rebellion in those days, a few years before Vatican II convened, seemed scandalously heroic, or just plain scandalous, depending on how much inclined you were toward nailing theses to church doors. I was no Martin Luther, but I thrilled at any display of dissent. …”

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How My Mother Became White


My father’s family refused to attend his wedding. They refused because they disapproved of the woman he was marrying, an Irish-Catholic. They were Catholics themselves, so it wasn’t the woman’s religion they objected to. They refused to accept her into their family because she was the daughter of Irish immigrants. She was not a suitable mate for their son and brother because she wasn’t “white,” or at least was less white than they were.

They wouldn’t have put it that way back in 1928. They would have said she was riffraff or used some other pejorative term to indicate the woman’s low social status. But whiteness was the criterion they used to judge her even if they didn’t realize it. Germans, some Germans, had been considered almost white for the better part of a century. Irish were not.

This sort of thinking is hard to understand in the second decade of the 21st century. We think we know what “white” and non-white, or “people of color,” “black,” Latino and Asian mean. But my mother and her people, who were as white as Finns in pigmentation, were not considered so for more than a century after they began arriving in this country in substantial numbers. True, by the Naturalization Act of 1790 they were not excluded from citizenship as were Africans. But the only people who were were truly white were the British, so-called Anglo-Saxons. And well into the 19th century even those did not always include Scots, who were once looked upon as no better than savages.

In America “white” and “black” are not indications of skin color. They are social markers. The color that accompanies them is imagined. Swedes were once considered non-white, “swarthy Swedes.” Italians were “guineas,” the word originally used to designate Africans who derived typically from the coast of Guinea. Hungarians, Poles and Russians were not white until the fourth or fifth decade of the 20th century. Even more, each of these nationalities were each different races. When judges in the 1920s had to decide who was white and who wasn’t they heard testimony from experts who might state there were anywhere from three to forty or more races.

We think we have this sorted out now. There are whites and there are people of color. Or, there are African Americans (meaning anyone who has any African ancestry no matter what they look like), Latinos/Hispanics (no matter what color they are), and Asians. The idea that someone of Irish or French descent is not white seems preposterous to us, unless they are also of African descent.

This change of perspective is not the result of historical accident or the consequence of our maturing as a nation. What made those Poles, Swedes, Belgians and other peoples non-white is the same thing that made them better than the “race” beneath them in the racial pecking order: they were not Anglo-Saxon, i.e. truly white, but they were not “black.”

My mother’s complexion was lighter than my father’s, whose people were from Bavaria. Yet, as Irish, she belonged to a race inferior to his. He in turn was less white than a Hoover or a Coolidge. Eastern Europeans were less white than most western Europeans (also less intelligent and deficient in other ways as well).

But “blacks” were in a category of their own, and still are. That’s why Richard Rothstein, the author of The Color of Law, objects to the term “people of color.” The experience of African Americans is unique, unparalleled in the history of the world. No other society has defined anyone by one ancestor, no matter how remote, our so-called One-drop Rule. And in America other brown-skin people have not been discriminated against as have African Americans. Mexicans were admitted to communities no African American was allowed to live in. In 2019 African Americans marry whites at a minuscule rate compared with Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, though Puerto Ricans are fifty percent African heritage and Mexicans and Africans have intermixed to such an extent that there is little obvious trace of the African in today’s Mexican population.

It’s a cliché that the first word a new immigrant from Europe learned was “nigger.” That’s what those immigrants were not, they learned, no matter how badly they were treated by folk “whiter” than themselves, no matter how low on the totem pole of American life was the position they occupied. But neither were they – Polaks, Hunkies, Dagos, Kikes, Donkeys, Krauts and others – really white. Most of them, including my father and belatedly my mother, did become honorary whites in the 1930s. That was when the Roosevelt administration granted them new homes with dirt-cheap mortgages underwritten by the federal government on the explicit, written stipulation that only whites be sold those homes and that those homes be resold only to members of the white race.

The Nazis were more liberal in that decade when they decided who was and who wasn’t Aryan than we were in our One-drop Rule. The lawyers and jurists charged with drawing up the Nuremberg Laws seriously considered American racial law and practice but decided it was too harsh. They settled on one non-Aryan grandparent as the standard by which to exclude someone from the master race.

The One-drop Rule started in the North. Southerners knew too much about their family histories to believe in such a fiction before the North imported it into the South after Union troops were removed following Reconstruction. But Dixie embraced it as its own, and a fiction of racial purity became national in a way it had never done so in the history of this or any other nation.

The second world war did a lot to knock Americans of German descent off their pedestals as just one step lower than their Anglo-Saxon betters. During the first war my father was confronted as a child with images of German soldiers impaling Belgian children on their bayonets. It would seem that vulnerable period of his childhood should have made him feel inclined to shun his German ancestry. But he still sprinkled German in his speech (he was third-generation American) when I was a young child during the second world war. My mother was his “leibchen” or “schotzie,” what didn’t matter was “max nix.” But that changed during or soon after the war when he no longer seemed to remember any German and in response to my questions about our German roots told me it was better not to inquire (it turned out he didn’t know anything himself; he was just afraid of finding out the worst).

By then, the early 1950s, my mother, along with other Americans of European descent, had become permanently white. The totem pole remained the same: Anglo-Saxons at the top by themselves, southern Italians at the bottom. But everyone who derived from the continent of Europe were now accepted as members of the white race based upon one criterion: they were not black, not “Negro.”

If anything, our ideas of “white” and “black” have hardened since then despite the end of legal discrimination. How can that be? Why do we employ a ridiculous term like “mixed race” at a time in human history when any biological basis for the idea of race has been proven baseless? And why is our concept of race so radically strict, even in face of evidence that tens of millions of “white” Americans have substantial African ancestry whether they know it or not?

The Queen of England is black by American standards. She boasted of her African ancestor when she made her first tour of the Commonwealth in the 1950s. Forty percent of Brits of African ancestry marry non-blacks. Latinos, Japanese, American Indians intermarry at similar rates with white Americans as British blacks do with British whites. But American blacks remain uniquely marginalized.

Megan Markle or Colin Powell would not be considered black in any place but the US. Certainly not in Africa, not even in apartheid South Africa. Trevor Noah was kept indoors by his grandmother because she knew if she let him play on the street with the neighbors’ children, who considered him white, he would be arrested for living in a black township. Noah’s father is Swiss. In America he can be taken for Latino but certainly not for white.

There was a time, especially in the old South, when what today is known as mixed race was almost the norm, in places like South Carolina and Florida especially. In Florida under the Spanish, “race” was a matter of status, not color, much as it is in Brazil today. The words “white” and “black” were used, but they did not indicate pigmentation. After America took over that state the first thing it did was reduce dark-skinned people to slavery no matter what their previous social status. Those who could fled to more tolerant societies like Cuba.

Left to themselves, people mix. The idea that color-prejudice is built into us as human beings has no historical basis. It’s not that we don’t notice color, but the idea that people will shun each other because of it just isn’t true. It’s only when color becomes a marker for something else – slave status, e.g., as it did in the 19th-century South and a kind of untouchable status thereafter – that it takes on the force of a natural condition.

Before the suburbanization of America working-class people of all colors lived together and had families together. Institutional racial policies by the federal, state and municipal government of the US separated them beginning in the early part of the 20th century. “Whites” were lured out of the cities into suburbs built exclusively for them, while “blacks” were ghettoized and deprived of services that could not be denied to whites.

But the coup de grace of economic and social death was visited on African Americans by the racist policies of the New Deal. The Federal Housing Administration and later the Veterans Administration underwrote tens of millions of American mortgages on the condition, explicitly mandated, that none of those homes be sold or resold to Negroes.

Middle-class wealth in the US is based on home ownership. It represents an investment to draw upon and pass on to children. It’s what created the middle class in this nation, the white middle class. Denying African Americans that wealth (they have only 5-10% of their white fellow citizens’) meant condemning them not just to substandard living conditions and services but to substandard education as well and ultimately to de facto segregation.

American schools are as segregated today as they were at the time of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. American neighborhoods are as segregated as well.

What made the rest of us white, the privilege of home ownership at rock-bottom cost, at the same time defined who was black in a way centuries of chattel slavery and decades of Jim Crow could not accomplish. When we watch a Ferguson explode on our TV screens or hear about the latest shooting of an unarmed African American by a policeman, we are not seeing and hearing the results of the Middle Passage or the consequences of the One-drop Rule. We are confronted with the consequences of deliberate government policies put into place by successive administrations since the days of Woodrow Wilson, culminating with the legislation passed under the administrations of FDR.

We admit discrimination and racism are horrible but we quickly add that my ancestors weren’t even in this country during the time of slavery and never participated in the worst crimes of Jim Crow. That may be true. But our parents and grandparents received critical financial assistance from the federal government at a time that assistance made possible an ascent into the middle class for themselves and their offspring. That critical assistance was denied by law to African Americans. And that has made all the difference.

If you would like to read a couple of the books that helped lift me out of my ignorance—none of which, by the way, are out of the mainstream of orthodox scholarship—I offer the following:

The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein, Liveright Publishing, 2017.

Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, David R. Roediger, Basic Books, 2006.

For a concise and striking summary of Professor Rothstein’s book, I suggest this interview with him. It runs about 25 minutes.

You Think What You Are

My latest at Eclectica:

DaVinci's The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485)


The Collective Me

“We believe so firmly in our individuality that we don’t see how much of us is unoriginal, imitative, someone else’s—everyone else’s….”

My latest at Eclectica:

The More Things Change… When Are We Going to Learn Our Own History?

NPR’s Marketplace reported yesterday about a family in a town in Ohio being victimized by a very pernicious real estate scam. That family is one of many in the area and across the country who lost their homes following the 2008 financial collapse. Unable to get a regular mortgage, they were offered and accepted a “rental to buy” at what seemed reasonable terms. But it turned out there were tens of thousands of dollars in liabilities with the property that they were responsible for,  including 112 building violations and $3,000 a year in taxes. This, despite their being just renters.By TrustTruth

Half of their monthly rent, just $400, is supposed to go toward eventual ownership of the house. But it they fail to make a single payment they will be evicted, with no equity due them no matter how much they have paid in toward the house’s purchase and no reimbursement for any monies they have spent to maintain/restore the property or for taxes paid on it.

This situation is going on all across the country and comports, the NPR report concluded by saying, with the history of redlining practiced by banks in African American and other minority communities.

What the report did not point out is the historical context that would explain why African Americans and others are freely preyed upon this way in 2018.

When low-down-payment, low-interest, low-monthly-payment mortgages became available to working-class Americans under an underwriting arrangement between developers and the Federal Housing Administration set up in the FDR administration in the 1930s, African Americans were deliberately and specifically excluded from those mortgages. Sharks like the ones who are victimizing that family in Ohio and others stepped in back then as well to offer the same kind of rent-to-own arrangements, under the same installment-plan conditions: one missed payment and you’re out, no matter how long you have paid into the property. No chance of selling even at a loss. Nothing.

That the same scam is being perpetrated on the same group of people eighty years later should be a national scandal, not a five-minute story on public-radio. If the FHA and later the Veterans Administration had not excluded African Americans from affordable home ownership over several decades (it only ended, legally, in the 1970s), that family in Ohio and millions more like them would not have found themselves prey to such victimization. African Americans would, over the generations, have been able to amass the kind of home equity that the children and grandchildren of poor European immigrants were able to do. That Ohio family’s situation has deep historical roots that deprived two or more generations of the economic leg-up “whites” were granted, not to mention the job discrimination that accompanied their inability to gain homes of their own on an equal footing. As it is, today African Americans only possess 5% of the wealth whites do, wealth that would have lifted them into the middle-class along with their white working class fellow citizens.





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